This invention relates to hypertext. In particular, this invention relates to printing information located in hyperspace.
With the enormous popularity of the World Wide Web, the old paradigm of a computer as a self-contained resource of essentially linear information has fallen by the wayside. The new paradigm is that of a computer as a resource of hierarchical information, some of which may be resident on another computer that is similarly situated as a hierarchical resource. However, despite the increasing use of such hyperspacial information, some implementations of user services still adhere to the old paradigm.
For example, users often want to print out information that exists only in an on-line format. Printing linear information, such as an e-mail message or a single web page is done quite easily by sending the file containing the e-mail, single web page, etc., to whatever print function is available on the user's system. For hyperspacial information, this simple approach does not work. In fact, in the existing art, a user typically manually downloads every component of the hyperspacial information one at a time and issues a separate print command for each element. Such repetitive downloading and printing can be a substantial amount of work. For example, a hyperspacial document describing the design of the user interface of Sun Microsystems' web site is located at http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/uidesign and extends over 15 pages. Many users have complained that this document is too difficult to print.
Furthermore, in the existing art, the resulting printouts typically have substantial amounts of whitespace since the components of the hyperspacial document typically have lengths that are different from a whole multiple of the length of a printer page.
HyperCard, a program available from Apple Computer of Cupertino, Calif., includes a "Print Stack" command that prints an entire set of hypertext pages if those pages have been stored in the same file. The pages are printed in the order in which they occur in the file.
The Print Stack command has four weaknesses: First, Print Stack only works if all the elements of the hyperspacial document are present in the same storage file. This weakness implies that all information has to be stored on the same computer and, thus, harkens back to the old paradigm. Second, Print Stack prints every single information unit that is present in the hyperspacial document--even where the author does not intend all of them to be of primary interest to the user. Third, Print Stack works only if all of the hypertext elements have the same size since it prints a fixed number (exactly one, exactly two or exactly four, depending on the user's preference) on every sheet of paper. Finally, Print Stack assumes that all elements of all pages are available, which may not be the case when printing information accessed over the Internet.